Changes That May Stick
Although this year was an outlier, many physicians felt that some of the changes that were made to the Match process to accommodate the global pandemic may stay around for more than just one year.
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May 2021Dr. Pletcher called this Match an interesting natural experiment that could provide insight into the actual impact of changing to a virtual format.
Dr. Cabrera-Muffly thinks extensive website updates are here to stay. And while her preference is to return to in-person interviews, she now plans to send out info sheets to faculty and residents every year to facilitate interactions.
Dr. Gray believes virtual outreach will continue, including webinars, because the students have really seemed to enjoy it.
And, despite the stresses and challenges of interviewing applicants virtually during a pandemic, Dr. Martin said her program ended up matching with three excellent candidates who were very enthusiastic about coming to the University of Illinois in Chicago. One was a home student who had done a rotation with them, but the others had not—they had simply been impressed and excited by their interview day.
“I think it’s hard to say that virtual interviews don’t work or aren’t as good as in-person interviews when you get the results that came out of the Match this year,” Dr. Martin said. “I think a lot of the people are extremely happy with where they matched. It seems comparable to past years when everything was in person.”
Renée Bacher is a freelance medical writer based in Louisiana.
Signaling Favorites
The Society of University Otolaryngologists (SUO) this year instituted a preferencing initiative that students could use to signal to five programs that they were among a student’s top choices.
According to Steven D. Pletcher, MD, director of the residency program in the department of otolaryngology at the University of California, San Francisco, signaling had been discussed at prior SUO/Association of Academic Departments of Otolaryngology/Otolaryngology Program Directors Organization meetings, with a few papers advocating for this approach in otolaryngology. “To the best of our knowledge, it’s never been used outside of an economics PhD job market,” he said.
Between a record number of applications this year—on average, more than 70 per student—as well as COVID-specific challenges such as the potential for certain students to hoard virtual interviews, signaling made sense. “The high number of applications results in many challenges identifying ideal candidates for the interview process,” Dr. Pletcher said. “While faculty and applicants frequently contact programs to express interest prior to interviews, it’s hard to know from the program side if all of the programs received the same communication or if an applicant has a particular interest in our training program. Signaling provides a straightforward, equitable opportunity to demonstrate specific interest to a limited number of programs.”
Stacey T. Gray, MD, associate professor and residency program director at Harvard Medical School in Boston, believes that, overall, students felt like signaling was a good thing leading up to interviews. “I don’t think we know yet whether or not they felt that signaling made a difference for them.”
Cristina Cabrera-Muffly, MD, associate professor and residency program director in the department of otolaryngology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver, said she appreciated the use of signaling this year. “This made it much easier to assess true interest among the applicants instead of trying to guess,” she said.
While studies are underway to understand the impact of this approach, initial evaluations suggest that more than 70% of applicants were satisfied with signaling, and fewer than 10% were dissatisfied. Several specialties beyond otolaryngology are now investigating the option of including preference signaling as part of their application cycles.